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New submitter SkiTee94 writes "Many people, perhaps millions, in and around NYC were loudly awoken shortly before 4am this morning by an activation of the Wireless Emergency Alert system. As the New York Times is reporting, the alert was related to an ongoing search for a missing child. Given that the alert asked people to look out for a 'Tan Lexus ES300' with NY Plate 'GEX1377,' many New Yorkers are questioning the logic of waking up the whole city to ask them to look for a car. Normally such alerts are reserved for road-side signs. While emergency authorities have yet to give a precise reason for why the decision was made to wake up the city, many have taken the step of deactivating these alerts to avoid future jolting mid-slumber alarms (likely not the intended result of last night's exercise)."

The actual alert was even more cryptic due to texting truncation
"LIC/GEX1377 NY 1995 Tan Lexis"
Kind of a pre-dawn WTF. Told my wife it was my boss asking for directions to the strip club. Did NOT get a free massage.

Depends where you are but the emergency alert settings don't respect vibrate or noise around here. Which makes sense. If it's an emergency alert, for a real emergency, people beyond just the cell phone operator should want to know about it.

We got one where I am a few days ago for a tornado warning. In that context the phone having a loud panic attack seems prudent - tornado incoming right bloody now.

Emergency alerts should be for just that though "if you're getting this you need to take action in respons

I can barely keep track of the cars around me in some traffic patterns, much less take the time to read each license plate. And seriously, a tan Lexus? Here in Texas, it's inevitably "white Ford Explorer" or "Blue black Chevy pickup" or some other horribly common vehicle. Maybe if kidnappers start driving more distinct cars, like an old VW painted like a ladybug or something, I'll be a little more alert to it.

I wonder if you can get a free pass for any reckless driving charges by explaining that you were looking around for the tan Lexus instead of watching in front of you. Wait a second, this whole thing must be a trap since we know using handheld electronics while driving is illegal! ENTRAPMENT!

While emergency authorities have yet to give a precise reason for why the decision was made to wake up the city, many have taken the step of deactivating these alerts to avoid future jolting mid-slumber alarms (likely not the indented result of last night's exercise).

I don't live in NYC, but my phone settings were recently updated by AT&T to display Amber Alerts and weather alerts. The very first moment one of these went off while I was driving, I decided to shut it off forever as a menace. After all, I noticed that I wasn't the only driver wobbling a little in their lane right after it happened.

If I was woken in the early morning by one of these things, I just hope I'd have the presence of mind not to throw the damned thing out a window!

I've gotten 3 weather alerts already. Living in Minneapolis I question the value of sending Flash Flood alerts; I think the number of people who are at risk from Flash Flooding in their homes is pretty small in this state (it may be larger in coastal or river delta areas).

Was it an AT&T update that did this? There's definitely software support for it in IOS as I can see where to turn it on/off in my iPhone settings.

Do you know what a flash flood is? It has nothing to do with river deltas or coastal areas. A flash flood occurs when rain falls faster than it can be removed. This occurs when the ground is saturated and/or storm sewers are overwhelmed. Low lying areas quickly fill with water, which can be extremely dangerous, particularly if the low lying area happens to be a roadway. It is not a threat to your home, it is a threat to your life.

When there is a tornado warning my phone alerts me 3 - 5 minutes before the sirens in the neighborhood go off. That 3 - 5 minutes can mean the difference between getting to the basement and living, being horribly injured as friends of mine in Joplin were, or being dead. I'll leave the feature on.

Have you heard the alerts? They're more than just the "bzzt" of a normal incoming text or phone call. It's a piercing, grating buzz, similar to a lot of fire alarms. And it's extremely loud, even if your volume is set to low or your phone is on vibrate. It really is enough to make an average person jump, then look around trying to find what's about to explode. I've never had one go off in the car, but I can easily understand a driver wobbling a bit as they try to figure out why there's suddenly an alarm blaring at them.

Have you heard one of those things go off? On my phone, it's an awful klaxon sound that seems psychologically designed to maximally distract you from whatever unimportant thing you were doing, like steering a 100-ton crane, and focus on the flood warning two counties over, which is clearly more important. These alerts are good in theory, but there's a real boy-who-cried-wolf problem with the current implementation.

Last week there was an Amber Alert in the Valley of the Sun. A bit later, I thought that such a system was too easy to abuse...imagine an Amber Alert that says it's for a kidnapped child but actually happens to be for a political dissident like Snowden...and that's when I turned off the Amber Alerts.

They've also been excessively over-zealous about thunderstorm alerts, but I'm not quite yet ready to turn those off. But if they don't clean up their act fast, I will.

An alert sent personally from the President of the US had better be something like "US under space alien attack, everybody hide!"

If he starts sending out campaign crap or something, then I'll get up in arms, but thus far it seems like a useful thing to be able to alert the entire country when some major major major shit goes down.

Yeah, when you've reserved the function for only the most dire of emergencies then it's a good an useful system. It's hard to imagine someone getting online and complaining "I was woken up at 2AM and it was only nuclear war!!! Don't they know that I need good uninterrupted sleep to be productive at my job?!?"

Everybody is saying "cry wolf" but it seems like more of a "chicken little" situation to me. In the old "boy who cried wolf" tale, the boy was actually lying, just to try to have some fun. Whereas chicken little was just blowing things a little out of proportion and getting the rest of the barnyard worked up over nothing.

That seems reasonable to me. Our president isn't going to waste his time sending out alerts for every missing child. If he uses this system you know it's going to be at least a 9/11 scale situation.

After the PATRIOT act passed, one of the first attempted invocations was by Texas state Republicans attempting to track down Democratic members of their state congress who'd left the state in order to prevent the state senate and house from reaching quorum (They had to leave the state because otherwise Texas law enforcement personnel could compel them forcibly to return to the capitol).

Politicians will always misuse broad authority if given half a chance to do so.

I was surprised when the tornado warning alert went off on my phone last week here in Ohio. It was the second week that I have had the phone, a Galaxy S4. My Galaxy Nexus was more of a vibrate when one of the amber alerts or weather warnings went off. When the S4 fired, it was like a portable tornado siren. I kid you not, it rivaled the testing of the emergency broadcast system on televisions.

Yeh, mine went off a couple of weeks ago for a flood warning. I was already in the office and my phone and a few others went off. They made strange tones as opposed to the normal email/txt/phone tones.

Meanwhile, my co-worker was still driving to work when his went off. He never heard it before, it apparently was piped through the car speakers via bluetooth, and scared the heck out of him. He joked that he could've had a crash/accident when it went off, but I don't think it's that far of a stretch to ass

There is something so compelling about a decision made in the interests of good, but so boneheaded and asperger's-style singlemindedness that it results in the exact opposite. Makes you just want to smack the person responsible until *you* get tired of it

...this reminds me of the scene in fahrenheit 451 (I believe, it's been awhile) where the TV coordinates the entire population to go and look out their front door to locate a fugative. I always found that part particularly scary.

Niven's "A World Out of Time" proposes a mechanism for a stable totalitarian government based on the idea of a "hydraulic empire" [wikipedia.org]. The idea is that if a society is controlled by access to a vital scarce resource (such as water in ancient Egypt, supposedly) and has no external threats, then it can last a long time. In Niven's story, such a government failed only when they goof badly while piloting the Earth to Saturn. The society in question wasn't challenged prior to that point and collapsed quickly as a re

This was just another case of a non-custodial parent running off with the kid. The child was not in any imminent danger. She lost custody because of violence in her home (none of which was ever directed at the child).

Amber Alerts are meant to be restricted to cases where "the child is in imminent danger of serious bodily injury or death." [amberalert.gov]

From the NY Times article:

"A spokesman for the Police Department said that the so-called Amber Alert was requested after officers determined that the child could have been in imminent danger, but that it was the state police that approved and sent out the alert."

Of course they are going to say that, else they would have to admit they broke the rules which there is absolutely no way they would do given how stupid they already look with the 4am wake-up call to everybody.

Right here on/. I predicted (and was shot down) that this alert system was going to be used badly. The simple reason is that every bureaucrat thinks their job is so very important. Thus any government weenie who got their hands on it would start sending out "helpful" messages. A missing child is not the worst use for this but per usual the government did it about as badly as they could; The message being basically useless.

What they need to do is to make an opt in system with levels that you can opt into. Level 1 would be for situations where nearly everyone's life is peril. Say a poison gas leak where going outside will kill you. The Boston bombers manhunt would not count as level 1. Level 2 would be a warning about something that could kill you such as to stay away from an area as there is a poison gas leak there. Level 3 would be Lost children who have been taken by bad people (not a custody case) Level 4 would be things like weather alerts.

But my guess is that the government is going to be captain obvious with most of their alerts and tell people that a storm is coming (that has been in the news for 3 straight days), then it will be political messages of grief and loss (i.e. "My heart goes out to those who...") , and eventually things like reminders to vote and recycle.

But being the government they believe that their mission is so very important that people should not be able to opt out of this crap. The key is that people need to not be treated like children and the government should not have any special rights. If people want to opt out then they are clearly stating "I don't want your crap".

There already are levels to the alert system. I wasted no time turning off Amber alerts after receiving one, but I'm leaving the the other ones activated for now. I think it's a bit stupid to use the EBS tone for Amber alerts, in any case; it should be reserved for things like severe weather, zombie apocalypse, etc. If a tornado is heading for my area at 2 AM, I want to know about it.

There's a "Presidential alert" that can't be disabled, though. Hopefully, it won't ever be used (because it's likely that it

If there is a real civil emergency, you need the system to notify people whether they want the notification or not. The problem is that the city used this emergency notification system to tell people about a risk to one single individual.

This has happened at least four times in the last year or so in Atlanta. Amber alerts get treated by many phones as any other emergency alert, and they happen to go out between 1 and 4 am to the entire metro area, so the missing child could be up to 50 miles away.
A lot of my friends have turned off emergency alerts completely because of this.

If it means I get jolted awake by my phone SHRIEKING at the top of it's volume setting every third day sometime between midnight and 3 AM when I have to go to work the next morning, then YES, my sleep is more important.

Waking up five million people from a sound sleep once a week or so just isn't feasible; it's crying wolf and people will simply turn their phones off (which defeats the whole purpose of it). And it's not something you can set to low volume; at least on a Verizon Droid 3, even if it's set on vibrate, an alert blares at maximum alarm volume and with a particularly annoying shriek and you CANNOT set it to a lower volume; there is only "SHRIEK" and "ignore".

People in a small town can do something useful. People in a big city are probably miles away from where they could do something useful. Sending out this kind of stupid message just encourages them to ignore all messages in future.

Probably because in a small town, this wasn't a frequent occurrence. Drop a kid down a well every week and you'd have a lot less people turning up...

Obviously some folk are more self-sacrificing than others, but everyone draws a line somewhere, or else we’d all be living on the bare minimum possible and donating all our money to feed starving children/cure cancer/whatever.

You mean in places where you wouldn't get fired because you skipped work that day? and you wouldn't get arrested for interfering with the police? and the guy who found the child and walked him back to his parents wouldn't end up with his face plastered on TV with the caption "Child Molester?" for the next week?

Yes. My sleep is more important than getting woken up at 4am with an alert telling me about a missing child in a city the size of NYC. Who is going to be looking out their window at that time of the morning?

Let's think about the math. Add up all those minutes of missed sleep. Work out how that equates to minutes of life lost (people dieing earlier), add the car accidents because some people can't get back to sleep if woken up at 4am, and are drowsy when they drive/step off the curb.

Adds up to more than one child's life is worth.

Fuck the child. No wait. Forget the child, it's going to be fucked anyway (presumably that's why it got kidnapped?).

I see you like inventing numbers. Try these actual ones for a change: if each of those five million people finished just 1 minute less worth of work the next day because of their interrupted sleep, the collective loss would be equivalent to killing someone who still had 30 years left in the workforce. 2 minutes each and you're killing time that's equivalent to someone who has 60 years of work ahead of them. I.e. They're effectively sacrificing one lifespan in order to try and gain back another, except in this case they had little reason to expect it to work, since the alert came 12 hours after the child was kidnapped (i.e. enough time to have already driven to Chicago from New York). It was a bad trade.

Or how about the fact that your best chance for success is in reaching the most people? Ideally they would have posted the alert before people were asleep, but since they were already 12 hours late and a good chunk of people don't start their day off by checking their phone for things that happened in the middle of the night, they may as well have waited another few hours so that they could reach more than just 10% of the city (to use your number). If 10% of the city is reachable at 4am, how many do you think are reachable at 7am? 50%? More? And that would also be at or shortly before people get on the road, which means it'd be a good time to ask people to be on the lookout for a car, since it would be fresh on their mind (not to mention that they wouldn't resent it for waking them up).

Even more importantly, this entire system is predicated on the good will and volunteer participation of those involved. Every time they cry "Wolf!" like this they piss on that good will and give people a reason to change their mind. Once you lose those people, you won't be getting them back. How many thousands of people do you think turned off their alerts forever last night? One person's sleep may be a small sacrifice for a life, but taken collectively their choice to post that alert decreased the odds of the system working in the future with alerts that are actually decent.

But hey, at least an Anonymous Coward on the Internet thinks it was a good idea, so I'm sure they're patting each other on the back.

The Wireless Emergency Alerts system was intended mostly to be for major emergencies where everyone needs to be notified (e.g. there's a tornado coming your way seek cover). Sending an alert to everyone in the middle of the night to look out for a license plate number is a poor use of the system. The net result is that many people got annoyed and are now deactivating what could be a very important resource in the future.
Information such as "look our for a Tan Lexus" is best directed at people in a positio

Amber Alerts are worthless and do absolutely nothing in over 95% of cases. In the US, there were less than 400 reported stranger abductions, but over 40,000 amber alerts were issued.

Several police studies have shown them to be quite nearly worthless, but the economic cost of putting up thousands of road signs, deploying massive international tracking and notification systems has counted in the tens of billions of dollars.

You do realize how many MORE children's lives could be saved by $10 billion in health care and nutritional supplements... or even in mental health, considering the suicide rate amongst children is a factor of TEN higher than the abduction rate.

Say what? Where are you getting those numbers? In all of 2011, [amberalert.gov]there were a total of 158 amber alerts issued in the entire US. Of those alerts, 144 resulted in a successful recovery. 28 of the recoveries were a direct result of the alert

Where do you get your numbers? Because your number of amber alerts is off by several orders of magnitude, wherever you found them.

NCEMC, which administers the AMBER Alert program, reports that in 2011, there were 158 AMBER Alerts issued in the United States. (source [missingkids.com])

13 of those alerts were hoaxes, 6 were determined to be 'unfounded.' 127 of the cases, the child (or children) were recovered within 72 hours.

Since 2005, the number of alerts nationwide has declined from a high of 275 (involving 338 children) to 2011's total of 158 (involving 197 children).

That's a far cry short of "40,000 amber alerts issued," even if you look at the lifetime of the program, unless 2012 and 2013 saw literally tens of thousands of amber alerts issued every year.

And bear in mind, an AMBER Alert activation in California isn't going to be broadcast to the people in NYC, and vice versa. The number of AMBER alerts any person is likely to see in a given year tops out at 10-15 for people living in California, where the highest number was seen.

People need sleep to function well in society. If you wake up a large portion of NYC and break their sleep. They could be less alert during the day where they may affect the lives of others.

The alert system really should be information that you really should get kicked out of bed for.Tornado, Hurricane, Earthquake, Approaching Fire, Flood, Nuclear Explosion. You know stuff if you stay in bed and sleep in, you could be dead before your normal wake up time.

It isn't that Amber Alerts are bad, however it shouldn't be on the emergency, get the fuck out of bed alerts.

The police exist to handle such situations. I do not. There is probably nothing I can do to help, and certainly not while I'm trying to sleep.
If this happened to me, I'd have to start turning off my phone at nights.

It conveyed information in an arcane, effectively incomprehensible manner.

People who were asleep aren't going to be useful for finding a car, and pretty much everyone at that particular time of day is going to be asleep, or on a night shift at work.

People who are driving a car will either have to ignore the message or endanger themselves and everyone around them. Or get shouted at by their car's speaker system, apparently, which is an accident risk

I think you are making a false analogy here. This isn't "a childs life" vs "Sleep" unless you assume that there is reason to believe that, at 4 am, a significant portion of the population may be on the roads and able to look (perhaps still stuck in traffic from the day before?)

What is the expectation that some portion of the population, from their vantage point in bed, is able to spot the vehicle?

So since there is no expectation it can help, why is the mere appearance of caring about a childs life more impo

In this case, a child was stolen away from child services by his mother in the middle of a supervised visit. While the woman was bipolar and could have been a theoretical risk to her child (why she didn't have custody in the first place), this is not the sort of child abduction scenario most people envisioned when the Amber Alert system was put into place.

Additionally, most of the people contacted were in no position to help. And I doubt the alert was timely since it's highly unlikely that this woman has

It was screaming in a tone that I had never heard before, louder than any noise the phone had ever made. It sounded like the fire alarm, but it was coming from my pocket. Scared the crap out of me, could have caused an accident had I been driving. Fortunately it was during the day, not while I was asleep. Another one happened the next day, and then I figured out how to kill the alerts and did so. If I could make it a quiet tone, then OK, but this ter

Do none of your phones have an OFF button? You know, turn the phone off at night or must you be reachable 24/7/365?

Many have started relying on the cellphone as their only phone. Between high minute offerings and how more electronic forms of communication have replaced the phone call.. it's not outlandish. Though you're asking for trouble if you have an emergency to phone in while the cells are down (like during hurricane Sandy).

So people tend to leave the phone on and plugged in overnight for use the next day, and take advantage of the alarm clocks feature.

My phone is my alarm clock. It's certainly been more reliable than any dedicated alarm clock I owned in the past (which would run out of either electricity or battery power. It wouldn't work very well if I turned it off at night.

The same thing we did before the Amber alert system. The Police would do their jobs and put out an APB hit the streets and keep a lookout for a specific car. Alerting an entire city and "fear mongering" is apparently only a recent event.

Some alerts I want waking me up. Like tornado, hurricane, etc. Others, I do not. If I get woken up too many times by useless alerts, I'll turn off my phone. So will others. And then the system becomes useless. It needs some priority levels or message types upon which we can filter.

Oh and by the way: Stop recruiting me to help solve custody battles and other pissing matches between members of the Jerry Springer demographic.

Everyone was aware of the impending Mt St Helens activity... for about sixty days, including a state of emergency declared over 30 days before the main event...

Camping that weekend, breakfast heard an explosion and I joked Mount St. Helens blew. Packed upand left the valley about 5:00pm when we saw the sky. Living in Texas I've seen tornado clouds and what it looked like.

Stopping in for more beer I asked whats with the weather, and told it was Mount St. Helens.

No emergency devices, no radio alerts nada thus the first part of the sentence"When Mount St. Helens blew nothing happened announcement wise,"